So why don’t these orgs who are voracious for profits just rewrite things to be more efficient? Probably because rewriting things also uses a scarce resource: organizational attention.

I’m in this boat myself on a micro scale: I run a fleet of GPU servers for my SaaS and I know that I could improve the efficiency of what I’m running on them by 20% or more, but it’s far cheaper and more effective in the short run to just throw more hardware at the problem than for me to spend weeks or months overhauling things. At some point the scales may tip, but right now hardware is still cheaper than my time is.

New features trump optimization most times, in my experience. New business is easier to win than lose old business.